The kind of knowledge that these machines have does not take the form of a rich, highly structured network of immutable concepts and relations with precise and predictable definitions. It takes the form of a loose assembly of inconsistent and mutually incompatible half-truths, always open to revision and transformation, and definable only by the particular distinctions it can make or elide at any given moment. It’s the kind of knowledge that many literary scholars and humanists have found quite interesting for the last few decades. ...

The change has certainly brought computational methods closer to the mainstream of the humanities. But we mustn’t mistake the change by imagining that humanists have somehow adopted a new scientism. A better explanation of this change is that computer scientists, as they have learned to embrace the kinds of knowledge produced by randomness, have reached a belated understanding of the value of — dare I say it? — post-structuralist ways of knowing.